


Knowing how to say hello

by MidLifeLez



Category: Holby City
Genre: Bernie comes home!, But Kind Of Soft, F/F, Fluff and Smut, quite a bit of smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 18:23:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14502846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidLifeLez/pseuds/MidLifeLez
Summary: I started thinking about Bernie coming back and I had some Feelings, some of them (alright, quite a lot of them) NSFW.





	Knowing how to say hello

It’s a phone call from Jason – _the_ phone call – that leaves Bernie stood in arrivals at Heathrow at 6.30am with no one to greet her. Serena had been stepping into her shoes, car keys in hand, a quick look in the mirror, when her phone had screamed to life and scared her half to death. She’d looked at it and sighed; this was not the first early hours call Jason had made to her, not by a long chalk. In fact, they’d only become more frequent as Greta’s due date had got closer. Serena answered as she pulled on a jacket.

“Morning Ja-”

“Auntie Serena, Greta has gone into labour.” Jason hadn’t paused as Serena spluttered in response. “We are waiting for a taxi to take us to the hospital.”

“Ri… right,” Serena had said. “Right. Are you sure? No, you’re right, sorry, of course. I’ll meet you there. Bye love.”

Bernie waits at the airport for 20 minutes, buys a coffee and scans the headlines on the newsstand before she thinks to switch her phone on. She finds two voicemails and three text messages from Serena, explaining why she’s not there. Bernie can’t help but smile at the news and at the tone of Serena’s voice as she delivers it. “No problem,” she texts back, striding towards WHSmith. “Be there are soon as I can. #loveyou”. She chooses a card for Jason and Greta, picks up and puts back a small teddy bear holding a heart, and heads for the tube.

The hospital is busy when Bernie steps out of a cab outside the Wyvern wing, the entrance bustling as usual, and on another day she might take longer to stand and look up at the building looming above her, to think about what this place means to her, about how it feels to be back here, but today time is of the essence: Serena – _Serena_ – is in there, waiting for her. After all these months an extra few minutes is suddenly too long, and she darts inside without glancing at Pulses, without pausing to see if she recognises any faces as she goes; doesn’t wait to see if they recognise her.

Rounding the corner into the maternity unit, Bernie spots Serena ahead of her. She’s looking towards the other end of the corridor, her phone to her ear, and Bernie can feel her own phone vibrating in her pocket. Grinning, she tiptoes up behind Serena. “Calling anyone special?” she says, her mouth just behind Serena’s free ear.

Serena jumps an inch in the air for the second time today, and it’s barely 10am. Spinning around, she whacks Bernie on the shoulder – “what have I told you about louder shoes!” – and then falls against her, waiting to feel Bernie’s arms twine around her. She doesn’t have to wait long.

They stand like that in silence for a minute, Serena listening to the slowing _whump-whump-whump_ of Bernie’s heart, Bernie breathing in the comforting scent of Serena’s hair.

“Hello,” Bernie says eventually, quietly, just for Serena.

“Hello,” Serena replies; Bernie can hear that she’s smiling. She places a kiss on the top of Serena’s head and one on Serena’s cheek – she can’t be sure she’ll behave herself if their lips meet. Serena, though, has other ideas.

“Well,” Bernie says, long moments later, her cheeks flushed, her vision ever so slightly out of focus, though she can still tell that Serena is wearing a Cheshire-cat grin as she pulls her hand out from under Bernie’s shirt. Bernie thinks she must have a scalding pink imprint of Serena’s hand on her abdomen; she can still feel it there. “Yes. Good.”

The rest of their ‘hello’s and ‘I’ve missed you’s and ‘You look beautiful’s are shared under cover of the sounds of the ward; around them there are four women at varying stages of giving birth. Bernie asks after Greta and hears that things haven’t moved on much since the early hours. The contractions seem to have stopped getting closer together, and Greta’s only 3cm dilated. Serena suspects they’ll want to send her home, but Jason hasn’t emerged with any further news since half an hour ago.

“How does a nice strong coffee sound?” Bernie wonders. She puts her arms around Serena’s shoulders again and lets Serena lean right in to her.

“Mmm, in a minute,” Serena says.  

 

* 

They wait for another couple of hours in the corridor. Greta’s labour briefly becomes more active and then the contractions subside again; the midwife agrees with Serena that although she’s clearly latent, it would be better for Greta, and Jason, to stay on the ward now that they’re here. Serena and Bernie, though, will go home for now. Bernie doesn’t realise it, but Serena has caught her eyelids drooping once or twice, and she knows Bernie did a full shift before boarding a flight from Nairobi at close to midnight, knows Bernie will have catnapped on the plane but couldn’t have reckoned on the train journey from London, all the waiting under strip lighting on chairs designed for more fleeting acquaintance with one’s buttocks.

“It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen the house,” Bernie says softly, on the drive over. She’s been watching Holby slip past them over her left shoulder; now she turns and looks at Serena.

“Our house,” Serena corrects her, looking right back and delaying a gear change for just long enough to brush her palm up Bernie’s thigh. “Our house.”

Serena makes straight for the fridge when they get inside, offering to rustle them up a sandwich. “I bet you haven’t eaten in the last, what, 16 hours?” Bernie laughs and shakes her head, kicking off her boots and throwing her jacket over the banister. She is famished, she admits, but she wants a shower first. Serena nods and flicks on the kettle.

“Join me?” Bernie offers, her voice high and slightly uncertain, though Serena has no idea why. She has never needed asking twice.

The kettle boils in an empty kitchen.

They’ve each been reminded, now, of the exquisite agony of being in such close proximity, of being thrown together at the hospital: the delight of seeing the other, hearing the other; the torturous unanswerable need to touch her, to have her. In a parallel universe this kiss is all clashing teeth and moaning into one another’s mouths and hands tearing at clothes, desperate for some kind of purchase on the flesh waiting beneath, but here, in Serena’s bathroom, _their bathroom_ , with the shower murmuring behind them, they are silent and unhurried. It’s slow, almost ritualistic, the way Serena undresses Bernie, her hands clutching Bernie’s collar for the longest time before the buttons are undone, one by one. _This_ kiss is lingering meetings of lips, and tongues that dawdle with the memory of waltzes past.

Serena slides Bernie’s shirt off, gaze tracking hungrily over tanned skin peppered with freckles. Her eyes are drawn to a vivid red dash across Bernie’s forearm. “Oven,” Bernie shrugs, biting her lip, and Serena kisses the burn, wishes it away even at the same time as she is glad of this sign, this confirmation that this is still her Bernie, and she kisses the scar on Bernie’s chest with the same mind. As she places her lips to the small silvery line on Bernie’s neck – it’s barely visible now and she feels more proprietorial about it, not less, as it vanishes from most people’s notice – Serena unhooks Bernie’s bra and thrills at the little gasp this simple act still elicits. Another kiss, and another, and then Serena steps back and looks at Bernie, topless now; Serena is being so measured in her movements, so deliberate, but they haven’t laid eyes on each like this for months and she wonders if the look in hers conveys only the same reverence as her touch, or if it betrays too the feral desire she feels.

“Oh, hello girls,” she says, sliding her hands over Bernie’s breasts and dipping her head to kiss them each in turn. “I’ve missed you,” she says. “And you.” Bernie chuckles and lifts her hands from Serena’s shoulders to play with strands of silvery hair that are longer now than she has ever known them. Another new Serena for her to love.

“I’m getting in,” Bernie says with a flash of her eyes, quickly running her jeans down her legs and stepping out of them. Serena watches her sling her underwear down and step out of those, too; watches her move under the shower and turn her face up to the water, running her hands through now wet hair. That neck, those collarbones - Bernie _in profile_ , her very own Greek bust; Serena almost forgets to strip before she joins her.

They have had sex in here before with varying degrees of success, if by success one means orgasms before one or both of them loses their footing or overheats in the steamy enclosure – though neither would say they haven’t enjoyed the several glorious failures. When it’s a matter of urgency, of _please, now, I need you_ , Serena will place her hands on the wall, bracing them both as Bernie presses at her back, the water slipping between them in the minute, rhythmic separations of their bodies, the tiled surfaces making a concert of their sighs. But for now it’s back to slow kisses and even slower hands, hands that glide over wet skin to remember familiar curves, to renew old paths and course fresh ones. Their fingers and toes are wrinkled by the time Bernie says, “Bed?”  

Serena enjoys the speed and efficiency with which Bernie towels herself down so that she’s just dry enough, loves that Bernie won’t dedicate herself to this tedious task for any longer than is absolutely necessary when she has other things in mind. Bernie passes the towel roughly over her head once, twice, and then discards it, leaving her hair parted into thick sections that curl darkly this way and that, ends still dripping onto her shoulders – onto Serena’s shoulders too, as they find their way to the bed.

Now it is Bernie’s turn to look, to speak to Serena’s body with her eyes. She kneels over her and watches Serena’s chest rise and fall, thinks about the heart beating in there; remembers how it feels to fall asleep with her ear pressed to the sound. She places her lips against Serena’s sternum and holds them there, like she’s trying to leave a full print of lipstick on a tissue. She trails her left hand up Serena’s thigh, fingertips skipping and bumping across the skin, presses her palm briefly, _tantalisingly_ to Serena’s hip and then runs her fingers up and over a nipple, the other now under her tongue, her breath chasing its warmth with a chill that makes Serena shiver with pleasure.

“I missed this,” Bernie whispers as she scatters fleeting kisses up to Serena’s ear and then nuzzles in to her neck; “I missed the taste of your skin.” Propping herself up on an elbow – just low enough to allow her own breasts to brush against Serena’s, whose breathing stutters – she caresses Serena’s thigh, slowly moving higher until… “I missed _this_ ,” she says again, running two fingers along Serena, who whimpers now; who kisses Bernie roughly, grazing her teeth along her jaw, down her neck, each nip begging her to go on. “I missed,” Bernie starts, her speech punctuated by great ragged breaths, “how you feel” - Serena can hardly bear the wait as Bernie drags more air into her lungs - “around my fingers.”

_At last._

Surely this is the tipping point; surely now, _now_ , this reunion cannot retain its leisure. Only it seems to, it _looks to be going that way_ as Bernie strokes lazily in and out of Serena, toying with her, delighting in Serena’s hisses and gasps, happy to take the desperate clutching that leaves four little white crescents on her tricep, five more at her hip. She kisses Serena again: long, deliberate swipes of her tongue at Serena’s own, at her lips, and feels Serena’s hold slacken somewhat; they slip back into the wordless conversation of before. One might think that being apart meant learning to say goodbye, but the trick is knowing how to say hello, and it is not with words but with hands that have waited, hot on bodies that ache from their patience. It is with kisses that say, ‘home now, darling’.  

Bernie has never quite recovered from discovering how wonderful, how utterly magnificent it feels to slide her fingers inside another woman. Even after all this time, she can be distracted by the memory of it, by the very notion; there isn’t enough credit given, she thinks, to those of us who still manage to get dressed and go to work every day knowing what we know. “Like silk,” she breathes into Serena’s ear; she can’t _not_ say it, it is all that she might say, maybe all she knows how to say (is there anything else? That matters? Really?) and here, finally, is the paroxysm: here is the cry from Serena, the instinctive movement of her hips that lures Bernie in deeper, that makes a bucking steed of the thigh that Bernie straddles. Oh, what a flurry of limbs and sounds they are now! How shattered the slow return!

Can people even begin to imagine this? Serena asks herself; do the people who ask how I am, how I’m coping without her, have any idea of Bernie like this? Serena wants to be the only one who knows this Bernie, all damp skin and gruff noises, her features twitching – a smile, a frown, lips mouthing a silent _oh!_ \- as she writhes on top of you; this Bernie who grabs your hand and pushes your thumb to her clit as she slides wet against you; this Bernie who curses more colourfully, more ecstatically, the tighter you get – and yet, _and yet_ , well, wouldn’t it be a wicked delight to have them all know? To answer their coy references to her newfound ‘Sapphism’ with a sinful smile and say, since they ask, since they bloody well mention it, that you can’t wait for your hands to smell of Bernie again, to feel Bernie’s saliva drying on your bare skin. That you feel deaf without the sound of her coming in your bed. These are the things that Serena woke up this morning thinking about, not the baby that will soon make grandmothers of them, of sorts. She will climb the family tree later; first, Bernie.

Serena is deaf no more. If she cared one jot about it (which, needless to say, she does not), she might wonder how many doors down the sound carries as she and Bernie come one after the other, noisy and jubilant, a rhapsody of pleasure – though can one use terms of such lyricism for the sounds they make? A racket, then, and damn the language; save the poetry for the letters they send to one another across continents and let this be what it is: the chaotic, grasping, sweaty, inelegant climax to Bernie’s homecoming. They lay beside each other, chests heaving, Bernie’s fingers still playing with Serena because they can’t yet bear her loss and the feeling is mutual. Serena’s own hand (the one that isn’t flat on her brow, as if it might cool her down - as if there is any part of her body that isn’t on fire) teases gentle lines over Bernie’s stomach, swooping lower and sweeping higher, over firm nipples.

“Hello,” Bernie says with a croaky voice.

Serena smiles and clears her throat, rolling over so that their noses meet. “Hi.”

 


End file.
